


we're not broken, just bent

by doorwaytoparadise



Category: Hadestown - Mitchell
Genre: F/M, Some angst, i have a lot of feelings about hades and persephone, separate but related ficlets
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-07
Updated: 2018-02-21
Packaged: 2019-03-14 21:34:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13598844
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doorwaytoparadise/pseuds/doorwaytoparadise
Summary: a collection of small fics about hades, persephone, and their relationship





	1. come home with me

**Author's Note:**

> originally posted to my hadestown tumblr sideblog loversdesireinterlude

“Come home with me”, Orpheus says to Eurydice, a tangle of hopeful and relieved and worried. He stares at her with stars in his eyes, an innocent and all-encompassing love displayed for the world to see.

Persephone watches. Persephone aches.

She aches for their heartbreak, for the heartbreak she can half see ahead of them, but mostly she aches for a time long past. There was once a young man who stared at her with stars in his eyes, on bended knee, who had asked _’come home with me’_ and held out his hands imploringly.

Persephone remembers sunlight and his work-roughened hands, flowers around them and the way he tasted like coffee and promises. The curl of his mouth at the corners, the muscles of his back under her hands, the rasp of his stubble against her cheek. Persephone remembers, half-hazy, the way his voice had dipped low and soft, pleading like his heart was bursting at the seams, too full for him to handle.

Hades had been as young and in love as Orpheus, once upon a time. Once, they had both been younger and stupider and reckless, and they had thrown themselves into being together. Once, they had existed like two halves of a whole. Time had turned them older, sharper, and away from each other, and Persephone felt the distance between them like a void in her chest. Hades had bent his back into his work, so concerned about having _things_ to keep her by his side, that he didn’t notice she was standing there the whole time. Hades loved her deeply and desperately, because she left every year, but he didn’t seem to see she loved him too with how she also always returned.

Orpheus stood before Eurydice, dirty and exhausted, practically shouting his love for her in his actions and his words, and Persephone _wants_.

Persephone wants Orpheus and Eurydice to get their happy ending. Persephone wants her own happy ending back.


	2. wait for me

Hades knows work. Hades carved himself a kingdom out from dirt and stone, his own two hands pulling a city from nothing. His shoulders know the weight of a heavy load, his back is used to bending, and while he has others to do his work nowadays, he has never forgotten.

Hades wants more. He wants to keep building, keep creating, keep acquiring, and never let his hands be empty. For if his hands are empty, what can he offer to Persephone? He gave her everything he thought she needed and wanted; wealth, stability, warmth, light, a throne. He had torn himself open and laid himself bare from the very start, and every year he had to watch her leave. If he has nothing to entice her, would she leave for good? Because something solid, something real and tangible and a weight in her hands would keep her with him. Reliability is what she wanted, right? …right?

Yes, she came back, she always came back, but Hades wondered if the day would come that he would step off the train and find no one there waiting for him.

Persephone had asked him once, that first year and so long ago, nervously twisting the fabric of her dress. It was almost spring and the whistle of the train was getting closer.

“Wait for me?”

He had looked her in the eye, a solid promise, a solemn vow.

“I will.”

He would always wait for her, always come for her, always work and build and gain for her.

Hades loves Persephone. Persephone loves Hades. Hades thinks Persephone wants riches, wants a lavish lifestyle, to be kept in comfort, and pours all of himself into giving her that. Persephone just wants her husband to be with her.

Hades tries so hard to fix problems that aren’t there, builds walls that block out nothing and grasps at something that’s not slipping away so hard that his grip causes harm and it starts to break regardless. They say love is blind, but it can blind you in more than one way, and Hades couldn’t see past the distance growing between them.

(Hades never saw the way Persephone glared at his wall, his factories, his lights. Hades only saw the scowl, never where it was aiming.)

They fight. They argue and shout and shake the foundations of their realm, and they’re both old and tired. Their relationship is cracking and fragments lay strewn on the floor between them, with neither knowing how to fix it, no matter how much they want to.

Hades sees a young girl, loved by a young man, and he makes her promises, sways her with talk of a better life, and she leaves her young man. Hades sees Eurydice and thinks _’this is proof’_.

Orpheus is everything Hades used to be, and Hades nearly hates him for it. _Look_ , he wants to say, _look where your singing and idealism got you. Look at your lover and how she left you_. But Orpheus raises his voice and Hades feels the song fill him, move him, echoing back to that garden. To Persephone and her flowers, to the sweetness of her kiss, to the warmth of her skin, to the sun and the birds and to the time they had nothing but each other. Persephone had wanted only him. Orpheus and Eurydice only wanted each other. Hades loosens his grip. Hades lets them go.

They watch the young couple leave together, Eurydice just a step behind, and keep watching until they disappear from sight. Hades’ mind is whirling, too full and too hectic, and he sinks deep in thought, eyes glued to the last spot he had seen them. He nearly jumps when Persephone shuffles close, closer than she’s been in a while, and he has to swallow hard when she leans her head on his shoulder.

He thinks he knows how Orpheus and Eurydice’s story will end, but perhaps something can be salvaged here. There’s a beat, something heavy in the air between them, and its almost spring.

“Wait for me?”

Persephone asks, a wealth of meaning in the question. Hades looks her in the eye, a solid promise, a solemn vow.

“I will.”


	3. begin again

It shouldn’t be a big deal, but Hades can’t help being thrown. It’s small, something minor and simple and hardly worth noting. Except it isn’t.

Persephone is wearing his shirt.

He stares. And continues staring even after she’s shuffled by in her half-awake daze and left the room. She was wearing his shirt. She hasn’t done that since he can’t even remember when, too many years having passed in their marriage for him to really recall. There are chasms between them, or at least there were, before the poet and his lover. But even accounting for how that incident had let them mend a few bridges, the gap was still wide.

Persephone is complicated, and Hades thinks their relationship reflects that. Hades had once dug his hands into the dirt and built a kingdom, and next to that, Persephone is unyielding earth. Persephone is twisting alleyways tucked behind buildings, she is a fire burning too hot, bared teeth, flashing eyes, raised voices. She is the soft light of dawn, the calm at the eye of a storm, new life growing from ashes. Persephone is a weight in his chest that is heavier than chains, but feels like freedom.

Hades had thought that time was simply degrading them like it did everything else, like how all the gods were becoming relics and the earth still turned.

But…Persephone is wearing his shirt.

He stares at the space she had been, and hears the echo of the chasm between them growing smaller. The sight of Persephone, so casually sharing with him in a way they haven’t done in ages, makes him feel like falling all over again. He’s always been deeply in love with Persephone, but this is different. This is almost new: it’s sunbursts, fireworks, it’s the garden where they met and how the moment she became his wife felt like it was suspended in time.

He wants to breaks himself into pieces and slot them in the spaces between her ribs. He wants to wring himself out and lay everything at her feet. He wants to try again, now more than ever.

Hades breathes deep, and follows Persephone.

(She smiles at him from the kitchen table, and Hades feels like they’ve begun again.)


End file.
